Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life (review)

Challenging the view that casts literary description in the supporting role opposite what some consider narration's decidedly more dynamic lead, Rosemary Lloyd's enlightening new book champions the power, unassuming beauty, and above all, critical potential of the still life in modern literature. As it sheds new light on those habitually overlooked passages that offer an "appreciation of the objects that lie at the heart of domestic, everyday life" (3), this compellingly argued study explores the latent capacity of the written still life not only to reflect the inspirational and often "haunting" (xiii) nature of objects, but also to speak to such universal cultural concerns as class, gender, ideology, and the nature of art itself. In a series of chapters that explore its various manifestations from within a constellation of texts spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lloyd suggests how the literary still life reflects anxieties about changing sensibilities and subjectivities in an increasingly modernized world. Here, for example, a Balzacian bouquet of flowers preserved under glass evokes the transience of modern life; a collection of fossils nostalgically recalls, for Pierre Loti, memories of a childhood faintly preserved in dreams; renderings of smoking pipes (in Baudelaire) or dead fish (in Huysmans) represent portraits of the artist contemplating his craft; sheet music, an embroidered shawl, and balls of knitting wool come together in a novel by Elizabeth Bowen to quietly denounce the imposition of bourgeois domesticity as part of the feminine condition; and a glance at a writer's cluttered desk (from Butor's L'emploi du temps) distorts standard conceptions of time and space in favor of a more labyrinthine, indeed more contingent view of the world in which one can never be quite certain "when" or "where" one is.

Although the book's extensive taxonomy of still life in prose and poetry is brought to bear on work by a wide array of artists--including, but not limited to, A.S. Byatt, Pär Lagerkvist, Proust, Hermann Broch, Zola, Rilke, Valéry, Sarraute, Henry James, Mallarmé, Le Clézio, Iris Murdoch, Ponge, Calvino, and Woolf--certain examples are inevitably given shorter shrift than others. To her credit, however, the author's range is certainly impressive, especially when one considers that this study is not merely comparative, but interdisciplinary as well. Frequently invoking still life in painting as a fruitful point of comparison--while acknowledging, with a nod to Lessing, the specificity of each medium--Lloyd's keen visual analyses of works by artists such as Monet, Manet, Courbet, and Margaret Preston, among others, flesh out her readings of the texts without establishing a tired hierarchy between the two. Though readers must frequently place their faith in the author's own ekphrastic renderings of many of the paintings discussed here, to be sure the book is illustrated with a number of well-chosen, black and white reproductions that allow readers to see a selection of these images with their own eyes.

Of course, the presence of these paintings in the text raises a number of salient questions about the function of the still life across the arts. One wonders, for example, how to interpret representations of the same everyday objects shimmering in the transformed light of a photograph. How might we theorize the emergence of still life in film? Can we, for that matter, even begin to speak of still life on stage? Although Lloyd's study never explicitly tackles these issues, it makes a brilliant contribution to the field of inter-art studies precisely because it paves the way for such future inquiry.

Perhaps more importantly, however, Shimmering in a Transformed Light hones in on the transformative power of representation to reveal the strange in the familiar, and to release the hidden energy of objects that we frequently take for granted. By giving life to what are often considered empty ornaments, granting these mere things their subjecthood in art, the still life, as Lloyd so skillfully suggests, has become...